September-October City-Data Forum's Most Informative Poster Contest discussion (10 $500 prizes)

[StaggerLee22]

I'm never gonna win.





Unless of course.....
No I couldn't......
.......or could I?
Naaaaa.....
Go ahead....give it a shot....what do you have to loose???

Ummkay....here goes nuthin!

I would like to officially offer whomever a $5.00 bribe if said person somehow makes it so I win.
That's right!
5 bucks....direct from me to you.
{payable in 5 bi-monthly payments of $1.00 each, starting January 1,2013}
Think about what you could do with that kind of scratch.

Who's gonna help me out?
DM me for info.

[cleasach]

I'll be the wet blanket....

If the contest's purpose is to find the most helpful/informative posts and award the authors with a prize, then limiting it by when they registered puts more value on the join date than the actual content of the posts.

What if four posters from a particular time period legitimately are the most informative? Two of them will be eliminated in favor of others-- who might have less interesting posts but registered at the right time.

[Unknown Memory]

I'm definitely not going to win in this, but I participated out of curiosity. I wish you guys a big good luck. ^__^

[AnonChick]

Originally Posted by cleasach

I'll be the wet blanket....

If the contest's purpose is to find the most helpful/informative posts and award the authors with a prize, then limiting it by when they registered puts more value on the join date than the actual content of the posts.

What if four posters from a particular time period legitimately are the most informative? Two of them will be eliminated in favor of others-- who might have less interesting posts but registered at the right time.

Only one of them will be "THE" most informative of one year, and another year. Only two of them will be THE TWO most informative of each of the subsequent years.

They could've said "One winner, period." Would that have been more acceptable to you? What if 50 of them were equally informative? What it 3 were "the" most informative? Why should it only be one winner?

Or - why bother having any contest at all? Why not just thank everyone for being a member, and that's the end of that. Or, we could enjoy switching things up and being happily surprised with each new contest.

The staff will pick out what *they* believe are *the* most informative singular winner in each of two years, and the two most informative winners in each of the subsequent years. So you'll end up with a range of winners, showing the membership that you don't have to be a veteran to be informative. This encourages other newer members to continue participating and contributing. I'm not seeing any problem with this at all and think it's a great idea.

Advameg and City-Data are hosts to *THE* most informative data catch-basin of city-based statistics in the world. Municipalities, law enforcement agencies, travel agents, realtors, research groups, universities, think tanks, advertising agencies, all kinds of groups of people worldwide use it for this reason. The forums are only one part of City-Data. I think it's pretty awesome that they thank us for bulking up their bandwidth by giving out cash prizes for the most informative of the bunch. Frankly, I'm thrilled they thought I was one of them, and aren't all that concerned with which category they felt I fit into

[Administrator]

Originally Posted by cleasach

I'll be the wet blanket....

If the contest's purpose is to find the most helpful/informative posts and award the authors with a prize, then limiting it by when they registered puts more value on the join date than the actual content of the posts.

What if four posters from a particular time period legitimately are the most informative? Two of them will be eliminated in favor of others-- who might have less interesting posts but registered at the right time.

We had three contests already with no categories and we will likely have more. Everybody can still win in this contest and we expect to get enough entries from each year, that only actually very informative posters will win.

[luv4horses]

Just thought I'd mention that the title of the contest has had me confused until recently. I thought the term POSTER referred to a graphic presentation of an idea, not to a human being who posts on the forum. Perhaps there is a different way to describe this, maybe >...most informative posts contest<?

[AnonChick]

Or most informative member...

[Magritte25]

Poster, referring to a participant on cyber forums, is very common in internet communities.

[jfkIII]

I don't like it. Judging criteria is vague and open to non-participant user(s) interpretation. A contest such as this should be detremined by C-D members voting.

Just my opinion.

[NW Crow]

Originally Posted by Administrator

You will be able to enter here starting September 1.

We are planning another most informative forum member contest! There will be 10 new winners, $500 cash each ($5,000 in total prizes). This time the prizes will be awarded in categories based on each member's forum registration date, so participants will be competing against others who registered at about the same time. You can review your join date by clicking on your username in the top right part of the screen and selecting "Statistics."

There will be six categories:
-1 prize awarded to user registered in 2007 or earlier,
-1 prize awarded to user registered in 2008,
-2 prizes awarded to users registered in 2009,
-2 prizes awarded to users registered in 2010,
-2 prizes awarded to users registered in 2011,
-2 prizes awarded to users registered in 2012.

All posts made prior to the contest will count and all posts made during the contest period will count five times more, like in previous contests.

You will be able to enter starting September 1. Previous contest winners will not be eligible to win in this contest, however we expect that the winners will be eligible to win large prizes in our future contests and all posts will count.

Official rules are here.

This is a very good change IMO. To my knowledge you have never had a contest winner with less than 1,000 posts and few if any under 3,000. That is a pattern of heavily using quantity as the first-tier selection criteria, though I am sure the winners have quality too.

I still wish you put more emphasis on quality independent of quantity. Though that would take more judging time and effort, that would be truer to the stated purpose.